To Buy or Not to Buy? : A Study on the Price Discount on Luxury Goods, Chinese Consumers’ Luxury Perception, and Purchasing Behavior

As the Chinese luxury market has become one of the biggest in the world, this thesis seeks to investigate the relationship between the luxury perception of Chinese consumers and their willingness to buy under the price reduction. Drawing from Wiedmann’s concepts of luxury values, we propose a framework to measure the luxury value perception of Chinese consumers through the functional, individual, and social dimensions. We conduct a quantitative research and collect 315 valid questionnaires from Chinese luxury consumers. In questionnaires, we ask them to rate the perception of luxury goods and their willingness to buy when the price is reduced by 20% and 40% respectively. We perform multiple linear regression with SPSS. The results show the value perception in the individual dimension has positive impact on the willingness to buy, and the more price is reduced, the more impact it will have, whereas, the value perception in the functional dimension is not significantly related to the willingness to buy under both price reductions. The value perception in the social dimension is positively related to the willingness to buy when the price is reduced by 20%, but there is no significant relationship when the price is further reduced by 40%